Here are some final thoughts on my trip to Scotland:

• Excluding travel time, I spent about 10 and a half days in Scotland. I think that this is the perfect amount of time to spend on a vacation, because it affords you enough time to get settled into a place, but it’s not long enough to get homesick. 7 days is too little time to spend on a vacation, and 3 weeks or more is difficult because of financial responsibilities.

• My 13 day (this includes travel time) vacation cost me around $2000. This includes the flight ($1250), cash withdrawals (~$440 / 220 pound sterling), tour fees ($150 / 76 pounds), and other credit card purchases (~$200). That’s really not bad for a two week trip to Europe, especially considering that it would be closer to $3000 if I had to pay for lodging.

• “Aye” and “Cheers” are my favorite terms that I picked up on the trip. I plan on using these for years to come. I also love talking about Loch’s, Ben’s and Glen’s.

• The most embarrassing thing to happen to me on the trip was definitely being locked in the bathroom!

• I just spent 10 minutes trying to come up with a favorite place that I visited on the trip, but I couldn’t. So, I’m going to do a top 3. My favorite places that I visited were Tynecastle Stadium, Arthur’s Seat, and St. Andrews Golf Course.

• The closest that I came to “hooking up” with a girl was on my first night in town. Although I don’t recall the details, I was told a few days after the Sunday barbeque that I was getting awfully close with a girl who was wearing a cowboy hat. Pictures were taken. (I haven’t actually seen the pictures, so I don’t even know what that means).

• I saw the forth rail bridge 3 times, and I heard the story about the bridge at least 10 times, yet I don’t know if I ever mentioned it in my diaries. This is probably because I was so sick of hearing about the bridge that I the last thing I wanted to do was write about it. Now that I’m back in the states, I will give mention of the bridge, which was actually pretty awesome. The forth rail bridge is a great source of pride for Scotsmen, and is a very unique looking bridge. It is also one of the few remaining, and the second longest cantilever bridge in the world. Check out the wikipedia links for more information.

• I took 31 quicktime movies over the course of the trip. Four of them have already made it onto my YouTube channel, and I think a few more may make the cut when all is said and done.

• I took 415 photographs during the trip, and about half of those will eventually make it onto my website.

• I sent 22 emails from my jeff.sauer at digitalmantis.com email account. Another 55 were sent from my theman at jeffsauer.com email account. In addition to those two, 5 more emails came from me jsauer at threedeepmarketing.com account. This means that although I was on vacation, had a lot of good memories, and enjoyed myself immensely, I was still able to maintain my relationships stateside. This is a great sign, and should allow me to take more vacations of this nature in the future.

• When I got home from my vacation, I received payments from clients that totaled more than the cost of my Scotland trip. This is also a sign that I should be able to take more vacations of this nature in the future.

• I saw a total of 4 bagpipers on my trip.

• Departing from the Edinburgh airport, I saw 5 young men wearing Kilts. These were the only people I saw on my entire trip wearing Kilts. They also happened to be Americans.

• I rode the city bus approximately 25 times over my 10.5 days in Edinburgh. This is about twice as many times as I have ridden the city bus in Minnesota during my entire life.

• The Hearts (my favorite Scottish soccer team) have not scored a goal since I went to their game two Saturday’s ago.

• I completely fried my power adapter for my Vonage router, and I had to order a new one on Ebay.

• I ordered a blackberry phone so that I can answer emails while I am traveling. I am hoping that it will lead to me being able to go on even more adventures!

• To the right is my favorite picture of the entire trip. Don’t ask me why… I just think it’s so pure. The picture was taken at Anstruther, a fishing village along the North Sea. I talked about the village on day 9 of my diary. It is perfectly imperfect, and is so detailed. If you click on the image to your right, a larger image will pop up on your screen, showing you a very detailed, high-resolution version of the picture. The brown that you are looking at is actually a several small plants, overgrown together into an almost seamless canopy.

• I had a total of 5 drams of Whiskey over the course of my trip. I had the first 4 “neat”, meaning they did not have any water, ice, or other mixers in them. The last dram I had with ice.

• I actually ate Haggis on my last day in Edinburgh! Gavin bought some fried haggis from a chippy, and I tried some of it. It wasn’t that bad! It actually tasted somewhat like tater tot hotdish.

• I’m going to try to make a scrapbook commemorating this trip. I am working with my sister to see what my options are. She’s an awesome scrapbooker, so she should be able to give me some great ideas.

• I’d like to personally thank the following people for posting comments on my Scotland blogs. I can’t tell you how good it feels to see that people were actually reading my posts. It felt good to know that even though I was 5000 miles away from home, I was still able to communicate with my friends and family. Thank you (in no particular order):

My sister Kristi

My brother Geech

Tyler

Mandy

Jess S

Jennifer S

Erin W

Jenny K

Ewan

Stephanie

Nardos

• I also would like to mention that this diary is one of the more popular things I’ve done on my site. I’ve already received 400+ unique visitors to my site this month! That’s the most unique visitors that I have received in any month so far, so I’m glad that people are finding my writings interesting. In addition to the high number of unique visitors, I also received over 10,000 page views this month! That’s also a monthly record. I should travel more often!

• I only had to censor about 4 of my 11 diaries, which is pretty much a new record for me. I usually have to censor everything I write, so this was refreshing.

All in all, it was a great trip, and I have many wonderful memories to look back upon. While I’m glad to be back in the US, I already have an urge to get out and travel some more. My next trip is going to be to Colorado at the end of September. Then… I’m not sure… I have tentative plans to go to Hawaii, Arizona and Florida. Not sure which will come to fruition, but I can assure you that I’ll probably be writing about them when the time comes…